The Tale of the Ghost Typewriter
by wbyeets
Summary: Frank's "family moved away," so Gary brings his pal Joe Biden to tell a story about a haunted typewriter that some lame kids find in a pawnshop or something.
1. Intro: Midnight Society

_The scene opens with the classic Midnight Society consisting of GARY, TUCKER, BETTY ANN, SAMANTHA, DAVID, KRISTEN, ERIC, and KIKI seated in their usual spots around the fire. FRANK's rock chair is conspicuously empty. The moon is full. Somewhere, deep in the woods, a coyote howls. The camera pans across the kids' wise and vaguely sinister expressions as they look each other over._

GARY: Well, it's a special and sad day for all of us because Frank's family moved away. On the other hand, we all hated Frank because he was emotionally and sexually abusive to many of us and made these weekly meetings extremely hostile the majority of the time.

TUCKER: Yeah, I think that kid was a real, actual psychopath. Remember the time he tried to drown Eric—

KIKI: Remember the time he got suspended from school for trying to sell E to that one janitor?

DAVID: Oh my god! Yes!

SAM (stroking her hair darkly): I hope he's in a lot of pain, wherever he is now.

GARY: All right, guys, settle down. The point is we're all going to miss Frank.

DAVID: Uh, no we won't. Like, what? Did you ever meet Frank? Remember how he told everyone he was going to chop off your ears with a pizza cutter if you ever kissed Sam? I hope that kid never gets out of prison. He did go to prison, right? That moving away stuff is just you trying to—I dunno—why wouldn't you just say prison?

GARY: All right, fine, he's in prison. He told me he'd hurt my family if I ever let the truth get out, but yeah, I guess we've all realized by now that Frank's looking at some pretty serious charges. Okay? Can we finally get on with the damn story?

KIKI (giving the other kids an aggressive looking over with her lips pursed): Yeah, let's just hear the story.

GARY: As I was trying to say, Frank is gone, so we're adding a new member. I'd like to sponsor my pal Joey.

_JOE BIDEN lumbers down the path that leads to the Midnight Society's clearing. He is clutching a three-quarters empty bottle of Fleishmann's Royal vodka in one hand. BIDEN's hair is an apocalyptic mess, he is wearing at least four days of white beard stubble, and the right shoulder of his suit jacket has split open to reveal a fluffy arc of stuffing._

GARY: I met Joey last year on the debate team. He's a really cool guy.

BIDEN (slurring): Any of you kids gimmeurride home?

_KRISTEN and BETTY ANN and SAM all scoot instinctively back a few inches and try to appear as unnoticeable as possible._

TUCKER: Hey Joey! Good to see you again!

BIDEN (slowly swinging his attention around to TUCKER): Well shit, hey there little buddy! I forget your name, it's—Tim, or—Emmanuel. Hang on.

_BIDEN takes a long swig from the mouth of his bottle._

BIDEN: Gary, you know any other _hombres _that're_ loco _enough to just straight up _drink _this stuff_? _Here, you weren't looking, I'll do it again—

GARY: So anyway, Joe is going to tell a story, and then we'll have a vote. If it's unanimous, Joe will get to take Frank's place as a permanent member of the Midnight Society.

BIDEN (throwing his head back to address the moon): That's right, booyyyiiiiiiieeee! Arf! Arf! Arf!

SAMANTHA (disgusted): Hey guys, I just remembered I have to go.

BIDEN: Don't worry, sweetheart, the ankle monitor won't bite'cha. It's only till next February anyway, then ole Joe's gonna be as free as a… a rocket.

KRISTEN: I'll go with you, Sam. Betty Ann, Kiki, you guys have to leave too, right?

BETTY ANN: Yeah, I'm, uh, having an asthma attack. See you guys in school on Monday.

KIKI: What? No way, I wanna hear the story.

BIDEN (cackling, sloshing alcohol all over the place) Hell yeah, _chica_! Here's one that ain't afraid of the dark!

_SAM, BETTY ANN, and KRISTEN trot together down the path and out of the scene. BIDEN hunkers down in the main story telling chair and leans forward, inviting the remaining Midnight Society members to gather 'round and hear a tale of bone-rattling terror._

BIDEN: All right, Emmanuel. Gary. Black girl. David. Other kid. The _survivors_. I'm gonna blow your kids' goddamn socks off with this one. You ready? I call this story… the tale…

_BIDEN whips the rest of the bottle of Fleischmann's into the fire, where it explodes in a concussive _bloosh! _of fire and smoke. The kids gasp in fright and shield their eyes against the heat and quickly move to escape from the splash of flaming alcohol that has slopped onto SAM's usual chair._

BIDEN: The Tale… of the Ghost Typewriter.

_BIDEN blows imaginary pixie dust into the fire, which is still leaping dangerously high thanks to the bottle of vodka, and the title of the episode fades in. A super '90s sounding electronic trill with tons of reverb swells to its ominous climax. Suddenly the shot cuts to DAVID and the music stops._

DAVID: Dude, we already did a haunted typewriter one.

BIDEN: Well mine's different, numbnuts! Quit interrupting!

_DAVID crosses his arms sulkily and glares into the fire._

BIDEN: Like I said… The Tale of the Ghost Typewriter.

_BIDEN lets out a thunderous belch as the scene fades to black and the episode begins._


	2. The Typewriter

_The scene opens in the suburbs, awash in early sunlight, as optimistic guitar music plays in the background. A young girl is running to catch her bus. Over the scene, the voices of the Midnight Society can be heard narrating._

BIDEN: All right. Look, there were these two kids, Kacey and Emma. They both lived in Transylvania, which is the scariest of all cities.

DAVID: That's a country, dork!

BIDEN: Dude, go home. Nobody wants you here. Does anybody want David to listen to my story? Show of hands? So Emma and Kacey were both about twelve, which is the scariest age. Emma had brown hair with claw bangs and a pink t-shirt that had a drawing of a Mickey Mouse glove giving a middle finger on the front of it. Everyone at school liked Emma better than Kacey because, uh, Kacey was starting to get boobs.

TUCKER: Gross!

BIDEN: But Kacey was pretty talented. She was going to grow up to be a world famous author, writing books about all kinds of stupid crap. She had a million ideas for books, but the problem was she didn't have a typewriter.

DAVID: Why couldn't she just use a pencil?

BIDEN: Because she wasn't retarded, David. Do you think Jesus wrote the Bible with a pencil? Now shut up and let me tell it.

* * *

Kacey was late for school, and it wasn't the first time.

She jogged down the sidewalk toward the bus stop with her backpack slamming against her shoulders, huffing breath, as if being chased by a pack of wild clowns. That was her latest story idea—_Wild Clowns_. Kacey was a budding storywriter, and last night she had seen a commercial on TV for a new Zeebo ride that would be coming to the carnival in the summer. It had sparked a thought: what would happen if clowns got out into the wild and started to breed amongst themselves? A subspecies of clowns could arise and evolve right alongside human beings! Kacey had spent all night jotting down ideas for _Wild Clowns_ and had only got to bed at around 5:30 in the morning. When her alarm went off she missed it, and now she was running late for the millionth time.

The bus rounded the corner onto her street and began to slow. Kacey screamed and ran harder.

"Hurry up!" her friend Emma shouted. Emma was already standing at the bus stop with a small cluster of badly dressed children. Many of them were wearing propeller beanies and rigid vinyl windbreakers with one red arm, one green arm, and a blue middle. Emma herself was dressed in her traditional Mickey Mouse Middle Finger t-shirt that her aunt had given her for Hanukkah last year.

"I'm coming!" Kacey shouted. She got to the bus stop just in time.

"That was close," Emma told her with relief. "I was afraid you were going to miss the bus again and get expelled and end up having to transfer to that school downtown with all the MS-13 graffiti."

But the downtown school controlled by MS-13 wasn't Kacey's main worry on that particular morning. As she and Emma found an empty seat and slid in together, Kacey heaved a sigh. She wanted a typewriter. She knew you can't write a real story without a typewriter, but there was no way her meager weekly allowance of $2 was going to enable that dream anytime soon. There was a real stupid and ugly kid at school named David who had offered to lend her a pencil to write with, but Kacey had turned him down. Nobody wanted David's pencils. They were always warm and slightly moist, and the erasers tended to leave weird yellow smears on notebook paper. Even the teachers hated David.

"You're thinking about that typewriter in the pawnshop again, aren't you?" Emma asked, nudging Kacey. Kacey looked up in surprise.

"Yeah," she admitted.

"Why don't you just show your awesome tits to Mr. Sardo and get him to pay for it?" Emma suggested.

Kacey frowned. Vice Principal Sardo was the most terrifying man she had ever laid eyes on, and that was mostly because he laid eyes right back on Kacey. He was a portly babyfaced Cro-Magnon with a wiry curtain of hair in the back that was done up in obscene little curls. He breathed very heavily, and was always sweating, and his breath smelled like poisoned meatballs, and you could tell he masturbated a lot. Kacey would rather never write again than face the fact that she probably _could _show her boobs to Mr. Sardo in exchange for a typewriter.

The bus went past the pawnshop. Kacey gazed longingly at the typewriter in the front window. It was an older model with lifted circular keys that you had to press harder than fuck. It was _perfect. _If only she could get ahold of that thing, she would be able to write _Wild Clowns _and _The Weirdest Cat _and _Jimmy Vs. Bimmy _and _Mom's Magic Bottle of Pills _and _The Haunted Nintendo_ and all the other cool stories she'd thought up but hadn't been able to yet put down.

Emma saw Kacey looking at the typewriter and said, "Why don't we just steal it?"

And just like that, it was decided. A light went off in Kacey's head. For the rest of the day, she could think of nothing else. She squirmed her way through math, where Mr. Purnbong was trying to explain why anyone should care about fractions; through science, where Ms. Frood was preparing the class for the upcoming dissection of a human cadaver; through English, where Stephen King was supposed to guest lecture but couldn't because he had turned up drunk as shit with three days' worth of beard scruff and a pair of handcuffs attached to one wrist and Vice Principal Sardo had refused to let him into the building; through social studies, where Mr. Achtung kept showing them the Nazi salute; through gym, where David had hit her in the face with a basketball by accident; through health, where Ms. Kraftwerk told them that "man-root" was a slang term for the penis; and finally, at the end of the endless day, through drama, where Mr. Snodsen-Hunk had them reading through a script for a play he had written that was set in the _Xena: Warrior Princess _universe. Kacey and Emma met during lunch and decided they would get off the bus at one of the stops near the Transylvanian Jewelry and Loan, which was the name of the pawn shop where the illustrious typewriter lived.

"It sure is creepy in this part of town," Emma remarked as the two girls made their way along a cracked sidewalk. They'd just enacted the first part of their plan and gotten off the bus at the wrong stop. The pawn shop was only a few blocks away.

"I know," Kacey said. "Everyone here reminds me of David."

A grizzled old homeless man in a blue hoodie walked past them going the other direction. His eyes floated in his gaunt skull like bloodshot dinner plates. Kacey zipped her jacket up a little higher and crossed her arms over her breasts. Emma suddenly produced a crumpled pack of cigarettes from a side pocket of her backpack.

Kacey gawked. "I didn't know you smoked," she said.

"Everybody smokes. Wanna try one?"

"Sure," Kacey said. She selected a bent cigarette from Emma's pack and stuck it in her mouth. "Like this?"

"Yep." Emma gave her a light. Kacey took a puff, coughed, and immediately vomited on the pavement.

A fat policeman leaning against a nearby telephone pole burst out laughing. "Nice," he said loudly.

Emma clapped Kacey on the back. "Put out your cigarette and let's hurry up."

The two girls turned a corner and there in front of them, tall and foreboding as the monolith from _2001_, was the Transylvanian Jewelry and Loan. Kacey cupped her hands around her face and leaned against the window, looking in at all the neat stuff for sale. There was the typewriter, of course, but there were also straight razors, black Fender Stratocasters with screwy aftermarket pickups, voodoo dolls, Colt revolvers, wedding rings, Japanese swords, vinyl LPs, and tons of other pawn shop essentials.

"Dang!" Emma cried from beside her. "Look at all that crap."

"There it is! I see it! The typewriter!" Kacey exclaimed. They went around to the doors and let themselves in. Almost immediately, before either girl could react, a mountainous hobbit sprang up before them.

"The name's Vink!" the man announced merrily, lifting his furry eyebrows and leaning back. "Pawnshop proprietor Vink!"

"Did you say 'Dink?'" Kacey asked.

"No!" shouted Vink. "I said Vink! With a vuh, vuh, vuh!"

"Get him!" Emma screamed. She hit Vink in the knees with a high-speed crouching tackle that knocked him off balance and sent him careening backward into a rack of sunglasses and t-shirts. Vink bellowed hoarsely and clawed at the rack with both hands, sending sunglasses scattering as he fell to the ground with Emma clamped around his legs like a rabid lemur. Kacey pranced to the front of the store and grabbed the typewriter off its pedestal.

"No!" Vink howled.

"It's ours now, bitch!" Emma told him, standing up and giving his belly a hearty kick. "MS-13 for life!"

The two girls fled the pawnshop, causing the bell above the door to ring hellishly as they went. Pawnshop proprietor Vink wailed in agony, more for the loss of his typewriter than for the new puncture wound in the lining of his stomach.


	3. Wild Clowns

_After a short commercial break, a scene of the Midnight Society seated around the campfire with BIDEN fades in._

DAVID: Wait a minute. You mean they actually _hurt_ Dr. Vink?

BIDEN: They sure did. Emma thought to herself, "It's him or me." And then she did what she had to do. She took care of business.

GARY: But is he gonna be okay?

BIDEN: I doubt it, considering all the extra weight that guy's carrying around. In fact, he probably died.

GARY: Hold on. Dr. Vink is one of our recurring characters. You can't just kill him off.

BIDEN: I've killed off better people than Dr. Vink, Gary. And if you don't want your grandparents to find out that you've been buying weed from me, then you better believe this: Vink is dead. He's _gone_. And you can't use him in any other stories after this.

_GARY's eyes fill with tears and he looks away._

BIDEN (lighting up a joint): Now, back to business. Hey, anyone wanna hit this? Gary? Kiki?

_KIKI, grinning, takes the joint from BIDEN's outstretched hand and draws deeply from it._

BIDEN: So like I was saying… Kacey got her typewriter.

* * *

Kacey and Emma ran back down the cracked sidewalk and away from the scene of their crime at the Transylvanian Jewelry and Loan. Kacey had the old typewriter clutched against her chest. As they passed the fat policeman who had seen her vomit, they waved. The policeman waved back.

"That was a close one," Emma said as they both drew to a stop at the corner, badly out of breath. "Good thing my mom made me take karate for self-defense last summer."

"I _know_," Kacey marveled. "That guy turned into a complete animal. I think he would have killed you if you hadn't been able to strike first." She unzipped her jacket, stuffed the typewriter inside, and zipped it back up. She now looked like she was pregnant with a very angular fetus.

"You want to do anything else, or are you just going to go home and write?" Emma asked.

"Just go home and write. I've been waiting all day for this. I have so many stories ready to go that I don't even know where to start."

"Start with _Jimmy Vs. Bimmy. _That one sounded awesome when you were telling me about it."

"Maybe I will," Kacey agreed.

They boarded a city bus and got off together at a stop near the street they both lived on.

"Take care, girls," said the kindly bus driver, and shut the door behind them.

"Go smoke a rock," Emma replied, and shot up her middle finger. The bus pulled away and rejoined the flow of traffic.

"Well, thanks for helping. See you in school tomorrow?"

"Sure."

The girls parted ways. Kacey felt a shadow cross her heart as she went inside her house with her backpack and the typewriter. Maybe it really was wrong to steal. The typewriter was the first thing she had ever stolen, so she had never before put the theory to the test.

Kacey's mom, however, had nothing to offer on the subject. She was asleep on the couch with a little orange bottle of Klonopins clutched loosely in one hand and a TV Guide open on her lap. Kacey passed her by and went directly to her bedroom at the end of the upstairs hall. The typewriter was starting to get heavy inside her jacket, so she unzipped and set it on her desk. And then _floom, _into bed she plunged. Kacey was completely wiped out after the day's adventures. She didn't even feel like writing now that she could actually do it. Her hair lay around her head in a blonde fan. She looked over at the typewriter and then closed her eyes. Her breathing became slow and regular. In a few minutes, she was asleep.

The typewriter stood on the desk, gloomy with age. It was almost as if it understood that it had been moved to the wrong place, taken by someone to whom it did not rightfully belong. Silence hung in the room. As Kacey's eyeballs twitched behind their lids and her chest rose and fell, the typewriter sat.

Waiting.

Kacey and her mother both slept through the evening and into night. No dinner was eaten. Sunlight crossed Kacey's bedroom in a slanting orange bar and then vanished, leaving her slumbering body in darkness. On her desk, the typewriter sat. The hands of the clock on her wall turned. One hour, two hours, three, four, five. She slept.

The typewriter watched.

And at 3:33 in the morning, it issued a hard click from within its metal chassis. Kacey felt her dream scatter like a flock of pigeons. She opened her eyes. For a moment she was wild with panic, certain that someone was in the room with her—but then she realized it was only the presence of the old typewriter, an alien object from an alien landscape, that was throwing her off. It looked so _wrong_, somehow, perched there on the desk.

Kacey stood up and went to it. She passed her fingertips over the smooth circular keys.

_Wild Clowns, _her mind said to her. _Start the story. Why not?_

So Kacey sat down, threaded a sheet of paper, and began to write.

—

_Wild Clowns _had gone onto the page like a spray of machine gun bullets, fast and furious and steady and brilliant. Kacey's fingers had slammed the keys until sunrise, _tickticktickticktick, _until they were nearly too sore to go on. And the story was a masterpiece—she had never expected the end result to be so vivid and frightening. She felt like a woman possessed in those early morning hours, like a radio picking up signals from someplace dark and far away. She couldn't wait to show the story to Emma.

School dragged horribly the next day. Kacey could feel the_ Wild Clowns _manuscript hanging like a stone weight in her backpack, begging for a reader. She barely even noticed when, in math class, Mr. Purnbong threw an eraser at David's head and sent him to Vice Principal Sardo for asking too many questions. All Kacey could think about was how well the story had come out. But the day finally passed, and Kacey and Emma rode the bus over to the bowling alley to get fruit smoothies and do a little overhand bowling.

Emma spun around like an Olympic shot putter and heaved her 13-pounder with a furious roar. The ball sailed through the air, smashed a crater into the wooden surface of the lane, bounced into the gutter, came clambering back out, and knocked over one pin.

"You girls stop that!" the owner of the bowling alley screamed from the bar, where he was serving drinks. He slammed his palms down. "Stop throwing them so hard! Are you fucking crazy?"

"Suck my dick, Sylvester!" Emma yelled, cupping her hands around her mouth to project. She walked to the ball return chute to wait for her ball. "All right," she said to Kacey. "Your turn. Let me start reading your story while you throw."

Kacey grinned as she fished _Wild Clowns _out of her backpack. She handed the leaves of paper to Emma and took her bowling ball off the rack. She got a good fast running start, launched the ball high into the air, a beautiful parabolic arc, and made a splintered crater only a little smaller than Emma's.

"_Stop it!_" the owner shrieked. His eyes were bulging out of his head.

"Dude, what _is_ this?" Emma asked. Kacey turned and looked back at her. Emma wasn't smiling. Something seemed wrong. She was looking at the story in her hands strangely, as if it was written in a language she couldn't read.

"What's the matter?" Kacey said.

Emma looked up and squinted at her. "Is this some kind of joke? It says, 'It was a hot summer night and the beach was burning. There was fog crawling over the sand. When I listen to your heart, I hear the whole world turning. I see the shooting stars falling through your trembling hands.' Over and over and over. These are Meat Loaf lyrics."

Kacey's mouth dropped open. She walked over and snatched the story out of Emma's hands and flipped to the second page.

_It was a hot summer night and the beach was burning_  
_There was fog crawling over the sand_  
_When I listen to your heart I hear the whole world turning_  
_I see the shooting stars falling through your trembling hands_

_It was a hot summer night and the beach was burning_  
_There was fog crawling over the sand_  
_When I listen to your heart I hear the whole world turning_  
_I see the shooting stars falling through your trembling hands_

_It was a hot summer night and the beach was burning_  
_There was fog crawling over the sand_  
_When I listen to your heart I hear the whole world turning_  
_I see the shooting stars falling through your trembling hands_

_It was a hot summer night and the beach was burning_  
_There was fog crawling over the sand_  
_When I listen to your heart I hear the whole world turning_  
_I see the shooting stars falling through your trembling hands_

_It was a hot summer night and the beach was burning_  
_There was fog crawling over the sand_  
_When I listen to your heart I hear the whole world turning_  
_I see the shooting stars falling through your trembling hands_

Her hands shook. Her mouth was dry. The owner of the bowling alley was screaming but all she could hear was a high ringing deep in her ears, like the sound of a guitar string pulled tighter and tighter.

* * *

_The shot cuts to the Midnight Society. DAVID is livid._

DAVID: The typewriter was haunted by the ghost of Meat Loaf.

_DAVID stands up, turns around as if searching for something, and throws up his hands._

DAVID: Meat Loaf. God damn _Meat Loaf, _who isn't even dead.

BIDEN: Sit back down, you sissy. Who's telling this story, you or me?

DAVID: He isn't dead! Meat Loaf is still alive, you stupid fuck!

BIDEN (rising to his feet, suddenly just as angry as DAVID): Go home. You're out of the Midnight Society for good. You're kicked out, chump. Yep. You're done. Get out of here before I lose my shit for real.

_DAVID sighs angrily and leaves the clearing._

BIDEN (sitting back down and taking the joint back from KIKI): Now, where were we?


	4. Kacey's Dream

_After a second short commercial break, the remaining Midnight Society members (now minus DAVID, who has been eternally banished) and BIDEN fade back in, seated around the crackling campfire in the woods. A wolf's distant howl can be heard as the camera pans over each of their faces, one after another._

TUCKER: So while Kacey thought she was writing the clowns story, all she was really doing was typing Meat Loaf lyrics over and over again. Creepy!

ERIC (speaking for the first time in the episode): Hey, isn't that kind of lifted from _The Shining?_

BIDEN: What are you talking about?

ERIC: In the movie _The Shining, _the guy has been "working on a play" all winter, but eventually his wife finds it in his typewriter and it just says "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" over and over and over, and that's when she realizes he's gone mad.

BIDEN (spreading his hands and grimacing in annoyance): Well, I'm pretty sure you guys lifted this entire thing about telling scary stories around a fire that you throw magic dust into from Stephen King's novella _The Breathing Method_, so…

KIKI (reaching to take the joint back from BIDEN): Eric, come on. Just let the man tell the rest of his story.

* * *

Kacey went straight home from the bowling alley feeling as though she had swallowed a goldfish. It didn't make any sense. She knew she had written _Wild Clowns _last night. She could remember large swaths of the text nearly to the word. What had happened?

She let herself in with her key and found her mother on the couch, watching the 5 o'clock news through a semi-lucid benzodiazepine haze.

"The hunt continues," the news anchor said gravely, "for the persons responsible for a daring daylight robbery yesterday at the Transylvanian Jewelry and Loan which ended in the murder of the proprietor, a local nut bag named Dr. Vink. The perpetrators made off with a rare nineteenth century typewriter that once belonged to the famous Romantic era poet, Meat Loaf. Loaf is said to have composed many of his best known works _on_ the typewriter, including 'I Would Do Anything for Love (But I Won't Do That),' 'You Took the Words Right Out of My Mouth,' and 'Paradise By the Dashboard Light.' The typewriter has been valued at approximately forty-five billion dollars, so if you have any information on its whereabouts or the persons responsible for its theft, please contact your local police department."

"Who the hell wants Meat Loaf's typewriter?" Kacey's mom wondered aloud, through what sounded like a mouthful of dissolving jellybeans.

"I wonder if David from school had anything to do with the murder," Kacey replied absently as she got a banana from the basket on the counter and went up to her room with it. Her mother heard Kacey's door close and then, a minute later, the chatter of typewriter keys.

"It probably _was_ that nasty ass little David," Kacey's mom said under her breath.

Meanwhile, Vice Principal Sardo, having finished yet another day of sorting out sixth grade bullshit at work, was twisting the top off a beer and sitting down to a TV dinner in his tiny kitchen. Suddenly his telephone rang.

"Who is this?" Sardo said peevishly into the receiver.

"Hello, is this Mister, ah, Sardo?"

"That's Sar-_doh!_" Vice Principal Sardo screamed, slamming his fist down beside the TV dinner and sending gravy splashing from its plastic tray. "No 'mister'! Accent on the -doh!"

It was a telemarketer. The man wanted to sell Vice Principal Sardo long distance phone service for sixty dollars a month.

"Thirty!" Sardo demanded.

"Fifty-five, Mister Sardo. I can do fifty-five."

"You bastard!" Sardo cried. "Forty!"

"Fifty."

"All right, all right, fifty. But," he pointed out, "_I'm_ losing on the deal!"

The telemarketer was quiet for a few seconds. Then he said, "Sixty."

"What!" shrieked Vice Principal Sardo.

"I said sixty. It's sixty dollars again, Mister Sardo. Do you want it or not?"

Sardo clutched feebly at his chest and let his eyelids flutter down. "Bastard," he muttered. "Fine. Sixty."

"…Sixty-_five_."

Vice Principal Sardo smashed the phone into its cradle with an enraged snarl that was loud enough for the man living in the next apartment to hear it through their shared air vent.

—

That night, after putting in several good hours of work on _Jimmy Vs. Bimmy, _Kacey fell asleep in front of the typewriter.

In her dream she was moving through a twilit graveyard in a flowing white ballgown, searching—for someone. Crooked gravestones punched up through the earth, some simple and rounded and some wonderfully elaborate carvings of gargoyles, angels, devils, damned men and women. The rising moon and the dying sun could seen together, competing for time in the same fiery sky. Kacey ran through the rows of dead, increasingly fearful of what she knew she must soon find—

And all the while, a frantic trill of piano keys steadily built.

Kacey found the grave she had been looking for and fell to her knees before it. As she brushed away the dead leaves obscuring the epitaph, the triumphant scream of an electric guitar joined the piano. And engraved in the marble were these words:

_Oh baby, you're the only thing in this whole world  
__That's pure and good and right  
__And wherever you are and wherever you go  
__There's always gonna be some light  
__But I gotta get out, I gotta break out now  
__Before the final crack of dawn  
__So we gotta make the most of our one night together  
__When it's over, you know  
__We'll both be so alone_

A rumbling from deep within the earth grew until it was unsustainable, and Kacey fell back from the grave just before it shot into the air in a colorless spray of fire. She tried to scream but could not. The crack in the world opened wider and the flames climbed higher and then roaring from the depths of hell on the back a silver-black phantom bike came Meat Loaf himself, four hundred pounds of human fury atop that hot and hungry engine, laughing and rolling his mighty eyes in their sockets and streaming his magnificent mane of hair out behind him like a pennant snapping in a gale.

"LIKE A SINNER, BEFORE, THE GATES OF HEAVEN," Meat Loaf howled, spiraling through the air on the blazing motorcycle, leaving a trail of fire and brimstone in his wake, "I'LL COME CRAAAWLIN' ON BACK, TO, YOOOOU…"

Kacey awoke with a scream trapped in her throat, clawing at the air with hands that felt as weak as moth wings. She nearly fell out of her desk chair.

And typed across the head of the page she'd been working on all night on was just a single word.

**THIEF**

Then Kacey did scream. And scream, and scream, and scream.


	5. Microfilm Research

Kacey barely made it to school the next day, and probably wouldn't even have bothered if she had remembered it was the day of the sixth grade talent show.

Instead of going to classes, the entire student body was herded into the auditorium where she had drama class with Mr. Snodsen-Hunk to witness an unending parade of tweenagers showing off what they considered to be their most impressive skills. Kacey and Emma sat together in the back row of the theater's stadium seating and continued to watch as David, now entering the improbable fourth hour of his presentation, demonstrated his oil painting talent.

"Get off the stage!" Vice Principal Sardo cried shrilly from somewhere near the front of the room, and, in a fit of helpless indignant outrage, threw a paper cup.

David glared over his shoulder and screamed, "Leave me alone, Mister _Sar_do, you fat _freak_!" Then he went back to his painting.

The students, who had been all booing and jeering the entire time, turned the volume up a notch. Now that Vice Principal Sardo was in the mix, they had twice as much reason to boo. He and David were just about equally popular.

"_You deserve to die_," Emma wailed at the stage, leaning forward and clawing her fingertips savagely into the back of the seat in front of her.

"Let's sneak out," Kacey said to her. "This is bad for my health."

Emma looked at her. "Holy shit," she suddenly realized. "Why didn't I think of that four hours ago? I deserve to have watched this."

Emma and Kacey slithered to the ground and snuck through the forest of ankles until they were close enough to the auditorium's entrance to make a break for it.

"Hey, they're getting away!" David screamed, pointing with his paintbrush. He'd happened to look out at the audience at exactly the right moment to notice the two girls moving for the open doorway. There was a moment of shocked silence before the crowed erupted in a roar of mindless approval, and suddenly Kacey and Emma found themselves at the head of a mad stampede for the exit. Emma glanced back and saw Vice Principal Sardo trample Ms. Frood in his rush to escape along with the students.

"That was too close," Kacey said once they were safely outside in the parking lot. Teachers and other administrators were flowing from the building in a loose stream and then running for their cars. Those that had reached their cars were now beginning to rocket away at sixty-five miles per hour before anyone could recognize them.

"It sure was. He was about to start putting in clouds," Emma said. "Hey, you look terrible. What's up?"

"It's hard to sleep with that typewriter in the room."

Emma made a strange face. "That typewriter gives me the creeps."

Vice Principal Sardo suddenly came crashing through the school's double entrance doors. He banged his hip painfully and cried out, but did not slow in his wobbling pursuit of safety. The two girls watched him weave through the cars parked near the front of the lot, nearly weeping with rage, and then pause, stop, turn, and, when he thought no one was looking, go to steal a student bicycle that was standing unlocked by the bike rack. Vice Principal Sardo had never learned how to drive a car and usually walked to school.

"You want to go to the library?" Kacey said. "There's something I need to research on microfilm."

"You're going to be the first real, living person to ever ask to use the microfilm," Emma told her. "They're going to have to teach you how to do it. It's going to be worse than if we'd stayed in school."

"Are you coming or not?"

"I will come," Emma said, "because you're going to _need_ a friend after you're done playing with microfilm. You'll probably get 'severe emotional damage.' That's what happened to my cousin after they kicked him out of the Air Force."

The girls rode their bikes a few blocks to the library, locked them securely out front (against the off chance that Vice Principal Sardo might be looking to ditch his current vehicle and swap it for a different one, to throw off pursuers), and went inside. The public library was a large, multilevel building done elaborately up in Greek themes, complete with pillars on the front steps. Emma, who had traded her library card to Annalise Tait for a dead frog way back in second grade, had never gone inside before.

"You cain't come in here with no rude shirt like that!" screamed the obese desk attendant in a cawing Southern accent as soon as Emma had stepped within view. "Cain't wear no middle finger shirt in the li'bary, stupid little girl!"

"Go smoke a rock, thunder thighs!" Emma yelled. "Where's your microfilm?"

"Cain't look upon no microfilm wearin' a nasty shirt like that!" the attendant exclaimed.

"It's over there," Kacey said, pointing toward a sequestered little room indicated by a hanging sign.

The attendant planted her enormous hands on the desk and rose to her full height. "Lemme take a look at your li'bary cards," she ordered.

"We already showed them to your mom," Kacey said. Emma swept some children's books off a table as she and Kacey made their way over to the microfilm room.

The desk attendant had turned the color of an apple and was pressing one hand against a vein throbbing in her forehead. "Kids is shit," she said under her breath. "Kids is purest shit."

The microfilm reader looked like some type of arcane torture device. You had to load the reels in a crazy way that made no sense, and it had to be dark in the room for the projector to produce a visible image on the screen. It took Emma and Kacey nearly twenty agonizing minutes to figure out how to bring up the first image, which was of a newspaper article from 1931. The headline boasted, "Illinois Prosecutor J. Marcus Whittaker To Enter Witness Protection Program."

"Nice," said Kacey. "Now we just need to find out where they keep all the reels of Meat Loaf related microfilm."

"You'll never find that," Emma laughed. "I'm going to go look through the magazines to try and find a _Penthouse_."

While Emma hunted softcore pornography, Kacey hunted Meat Loaf. For a period of several hours, she opened and closed drawers in search of material that would be from the correct time period and threaded reel after disappointing reel.

"Here it is!" she finally exclaimed, as a slide bearing the headline "Loaf's Corpse Interned At Transylvanian Cemetery" rolled onto the screen.

"What did you find?" Emma asked, holding a three-page spread up in front of her face.

"This tells where where Meat Loaf is buried! It's a cemetery not too far from here. Thank goodness!"

"Why do you give such a crap about Meat Loaf all of a sudden?"

"Due to the fact," Kacey explained, "that his ghost is ruining my life as punishment for stealing his shitty typewriter."

The girls discussed their options. Kacey wanted to bring the typewriter to Meat Loaf's grave and bury it inside his coffin with him so she would no longer be a thief. Emma pointed out that this would not erase their thief status, and that they should try to transfer said status to David by planting the typewriter in his locker and then phoning in an anonymous tip to the police. Kacey explained how that wouldn't work because Vice Principal Sardo had already revoked David's locker privileges and that he was now forced to store his belongings in a much smaller locker in the boy's changing room in the gym, and the typewriter wouldn't fit in one of those. Emma suggested they simply destroy the typewriter. Kacey raised the point that if they were going to do that, they'd might as well try to sell it instead, because it was apparently worth forty-five billion dollars. Emma shook her head, claiming that forty-five billion was the auction price, and they'd be lucky to get twenty-five in a square deal. At this point, they decided to reconvene at Kacey's house where they could weigh their options in the presence of the typewriter itself—especially since the obese desk attendant had been pounding on the door of the microfilm room for the past half-hour, screaming that the police were on their way.


	6. Mourning Equipment

_The scene cuts back to the Midnight Society._

TUCKER: Did the police ever arrest Emma for the murder of Dr. Vink?

BIDEN: Nah. To be honest, Emmanuel, nobody really gave two shits about Dr. Vink. It was just the typewriter the police were interested in. Actually, they were _glad_ that somebody finally took care of Dr. Vink. He used to call the police multiple times a day with imaginary problems that didn't even make sense. The dude was a total nut bag.

GARY: Well, isn't it their job to investigate when people call with problems?

BIDEN: Only real problems, Gary. Now, here. Hit this and chill out and quit talking about Dr. Vink.

* * *

Kacey and Emma pedaled away from the library at high speed, hoping to keep ahead of the incoming police raid on the microfilm room. They needn't have hurried at all, however—the screaming librarian, much like Dr. Vink, had a habit of calling the police about every stupid little thing. Now each time an emergency call originated from the library, it was routed instead to a number the police had selected at random from the phone book. By pure coincidence, they had chosen Vice Principal Sardo's number.

"Who is this?" Sardo demanded, sucking in great breaths and lashing sweat off his forehead with the palm of his free hand. He had just arrived home on the stolen bike.

"It's Wanda Palkowicz!" the screaming librarian announced. "Got another case for you, chief! This time it's a couple'a potty-mouthed little girls in the microfilm room, wearin' inappropriate shirts!"

"Listen to me very carefully," Vice Principal Sardo hissed into the phone. He squeezed it against his ear so hard the plastic creaked. "For every future call you place to my phone, I am going to borrow and set fire to three books from your library. I will start in the classics section and work my way alphabetically down the line. Once all your books are burned I will start digging a grave in my backyard. I will dig one foot deeper for each call. When the grave reaches six feet, I will kidnap you and bury you alive in the grave. Do you understand what I've just told you?"

"Whale, one'a them little hellions called me a 'thunder thighs.'"

Vice Principal Sardo ripped the phone out of the wall and brought it to the sink. He tried to stuff it down the disposal for a few seconds before realizing it was not going to fit and giving up. Then he sat down at his kitchen table and began to cry. He had just remembered that he was a forty-one-year-old man and that this was his real life.

Kacey and Emma arrived at Kacey's house and parked their bikes in the garage. In her bedroom upstairs, the two girls stood silently facing the typewriter. It had a definite energy to it, a dark aura that seemed to press itself into their foreheads in search of the brain matter underneath. It had two large calibration knobs for centering a threaded page that leered over the rows of keys at them like eyes. Below its eyes, it had teeth in the form of dozens of thin metal spokes that punched letterforms down onto the page. And below the teeth, each circular key stood up like a sinister nipple.

"It definitely _looks_ haunted," Emma agreed.

"Sometimes it clicks really loud at 3:33 in the morning and wakes me up, too."

"Maybe that's when Meat Loaf died."

"It was. I read it in the microfilm article. He died at 3:33 in the morning of a food overdose."

Emma wiped a hand across her face. "Well, dang," she admitted. "Maybe we really should try to take it to where he's buried. I don't see what other choice we have, unless you want to write more stories first."

Kacey shook her head. "Meat Loaf ate all the stories I tried to write and crapped out his lyrics in their place."

That decided it. They loaded the typewriter into a black duffel bag of Kacey's that said "D.A.R.E." on the side and asked Kacey's mom for a ride to the cemetery.

"What for?" Kacey's mom wanted to know.

"To mourn," Emma said.

That seemed as good a reason as any, so Kacey's mom loaded the girls into the car.

"Can we stop at the hardware store first?" Kacey asked from the back seat. "We need to get some mourning equipment."

"What _kind_ of mourning equipment?" her mom asked skeptically.

"A pick and shovel, some black gloves, two ski masks, something to cover your license plate with, and probably some lock cutters. That should do it, I think."

"Whatever," Kacey's mom replied without enthusiasm. "Ace Hardware is right next to Walgreens, and I need to pick up my prescription anyway."

In Ace Hardware, the register clerk gave the girls a hard time about the stuff they were buying. He didn't want to sell them the ski masks or the gloves.

"We'll be right back," Emma told him. She and Kacey went back into the aisles and away from the clerk's view. A few minutes later, two small robbers wearing ski masks and black gloves came running up to the register wielding a pickaxe and a shovel, respectively.

"Give us all the lock cutters you got!" one of the robbers yelled. The clerk squealed in wretched terror and ducked behind the register.

"Aisle three, left side," he cried. "Please, don't axe me! I'll do anything!"

Emma smashed the pickaxe down on the glass countertop, shattering it and sending spark plugs and other little doodads flying. The clerk screamed again. Kacey went to get the lock cutters.

"MS-13 for life," Emma reminded the clerk on their way out the door with the mourning equipment.

"Did you girls find everything you need?" Kacey's mom asked as she started the car and backed out of the Ace Hardware parking lot.

"We sure did, although the guy at the register was acting like a total dick the whole time," Emma said through her ski mask.

They finally reached the cemetery where Meat Loaf's body was buried just as the sun was beginning to set. Kacey looked out the window of the car and over the cemetery's crooked iron fence, thinking to herself that the sky was the same burning color as in her dream. Fear gripped her heart for a brief moment before she remembered that at least she was here to end things, to put the typewriter back to rest, and that she had her best friend by her side.

"I'm gonna sit in the car and get started on these K-pins while you girls go have a spooky adventure or whatever," Kacey's mom said, killing the engine. "Don't take too long."

Kacey and Emma climbed from the car with their mourning equipment and the duffel bag slung across their backs and stood at the cemetery gate looking against the sunset like two weary gunfighters about mix it up with the sheriff in one final apocalyptic showdown.


	7. Under the Cemetery

The cemetery was expansive and hilly, but Kacey had been this way once before—in her dream. She and Emma made their way through the rolling hills and unending rows of headstones for what felt like ages before they finally reached Meat Loaf's aboveground mausoleum, standing over the various lesser dead people nearby like a dark Goliath.

"Look at that," Emma said, opening the iron gate and peering inside. "There's even a statue of Meat Loaf."

There sure was. He was cast in bronze and nearly eight feet tall, screeching into a lifted microphone, his great leonine features twisted with passion. The statue's width was nearly the same as its height, for the sculptor had taken great care to accurately depict Meat Loaf's massive abdomen.

"This way," Kacey said. She used the shovel to smash an old padlock off a small door partially hidden behind the statue. And when she pushed it open, a staircase stretched down into the darkness before them.

"We can't go down there," Emma said. "What if there's ghosts?"

"But there's already ghosts."

"Oh yeah," Emma realized. "Besides, those insubstantial mother fuckers can barely even interact with reality, unlike us."

They made their way down, with Kacey leading. The typewriter had begun to click at irregular intervals inside her D.A.R.E. duffel bag, as if it were angry or excited. The staircase wound down and down and down, turning, stopping occasionally and giving way to vast straightaways or even dark stone antechambers beneath the earth. It was here that Emma's smoking habit came in handy, since she could light their way with the glowing red tips of her cigarettes.

"I'm up to one-twentieth of a pack per day," she announced proudly as she popped one between her lips and spun the wheel of her Zippo. The Zippo was another item that had come from Emma's aunt, a woman whose influence was dubiously positive at best.

After a mile or so of subterranean stairways and tunnels, they emerged in a grandiose cathedral that rang with heavy silence. Lit candles burned along every wall and in a circle around the altar at the front.

Atop the altar was an open coffin.

"Meat?" Emma called. Her voice echoed and echoed. "We brought back your stupid typewriter. Where do you want it?"

"Heeeereee," a scrabbling whisper called from the coffin.

Kasey and Emma walked cautiously between the pews. Each girl had her weapon raised over one shoulder. Any ghost, zombie, skeleton, or other stereotypical cemetery bad guy daring to assault them would end up with a chest cavity full of mourning equipment for its trouble. When they reached the coffin, which was too high up to peer into, Kasey slung the duffel bag off her shoulder and unzipped it. The typewriter was going nuts, clicking and ticking and impotently trying to strike random letters onto a page that wasn't there. She held it in her arms and looked up.

A clawed, furry hand appeared over the coffin's edge, and then another. The thing that heaved itself to a sitting position to receive the typewriter looked like Meat Loaf, only mixed with a werewolf.

Emma laughed and blew smoke at the apparition. "It's Meat Loaf from the 'I'd Do Anything for Love' video! That's an awesome little touch."

"Typewriter," Meat Loaf growled longingly, holding out his paws.

"Here you go, champ," Kasey said, handing it up to him. "By the way, I used up most of the white ribbon. Sorry about that."

Meat Loaf scowled.

"Shit, you're lucky we brought it back at all," she scolded. "We're only twelve, you know. We had to get a ride here."

Meat Loaf took the typewriter down into his coffin and shut the lid with one clawed hand. After a moment, the sound of chattering keys could be heard from inside.

"Aww," Emma said, still smiling. "All the poor guy wanted to do was type."

"It_ is _pretty cute that he started typing right away," Kacey agreed. She zipped the duffel bag, and then the two girls made their way out of the cathedral and back up to the cemetery.

"Did you girls have a fun little time out there?" Kacey's mom asked as Kacey and Emma climbed into the back seats and stripped off their ski masks.

"We sure did!" Emma exclaimed.

"I had a good time, too," Kacey's mom said dreamily. "In fact, I'm still having one." She backed the car out and weaved at an abnormally slow speed down the street toward town.

The nightmare was finally over.

* * *

_The scene fades to black, and the Midnight Society and BIDEN return. The campfire has burned itself down to cinders. The remaining kids look around at one another, grinning widely._

BIDEN: The end.

TUCKER: Wow, great story, Joey! Really scary!

GARY: Yeah, good one, Joey!

_Suddenly, a slow clapping can be heard. The children look up in surprise at the path that leads into their clearing, and there stands FRANK, dressed in a striped prison uniform, complete with the little hat. FRANK gives four or five slow, sarcastic claps and then crosses his arms over his chest._

FRANK: I could've told a better story than that with one vocal cord tied behind my back.

ERIC: Frank! We thought you were in prison!

FRANK: I was, pee brain! But I escaped. They were transporting me to a different prison for even bigger, badder boys, when the truck ran over a banana peel and crashed. We all escaped into the woods.

BIDEN: Well, get the hell out of here, junior. Your spot's mine now.

FRANK: Not if I can help it!

_FRANK dashes forward and gets BIDEN in a painful headlock. The two wrestle and grunt for a period of several seconds before BIDEN, being a grown adult, easily gains the upper hand and starts beating the hell out of FRANK._

GARY: Go, Joey! Kick his ass!

TUCKER: Yeah! Oh! Oh, yeah! Great! Hit him again!

_FRANK has been pinned to the ground under one of BIDEN's knees. FRANK is crying and a long runner of snot has run from his nose into the dirt._

BIDEN: You little kids are nothing but trouble. Hell, I've got to work in the morning. What am I even doing out here in the goddamn woods?

_BIDEN wanders off down the path looking tired and confused. FRANK, now the victor by default, has apparently reclaimed his place in the Midnight Society. He sits down in his rock chair and wipes his face with one hand._

GARY (pouring the bucket of water on the fire): Well, welcome back, Frank. I guess. By the way, Joey killed off Dr. Vink in his story, so we can't ever use him again.

FRANK (outraged): What!

GARY: Yeah, it's canon now. Sorry.

_A new tear slips down FRANK's cheek. He had loved Dr. Vink like the father he'd never had. But the fire is out, the tale has been told, and the kids all walk arm in arm down the path together, ready to face whatever darkness may come. The scene fades to black, and then the credits song begins to blast over a still shot of Vice Principal Sardo screaming into his telephone as the credits roll._


End file.
